from the shockers dept

It's been a little while since we last wrote about the "revenge porn" website IsAnybodyDown which has gone from questionable (and possibly illegal) practice to questionable (and possibly illegal) practice. You may recall that the site first came to our attention when an "advertisement" on the site claimed to be from a lawyer who would get the naked images on the site taken down for a small fee. The problem? Well, the "lawyer David Blade" did not appear to exist. And his emails came from the same IP address as the site's owner (and, no, IP addresses alone do not guarantee they're the same person, but it raises questions). Since then, the guys behind the site, Chance Trahan and Craig Brittain, have made crazy claim after crazy claim often with little basis in reality. There was the attempt to silence criticism via bogus DMCA notices, followed by bogus legal threats.

Back in November, Adam Steinbaugh noted that it appeared that many of the images were sent via tricking people on Craigslist into sending naked pictures, which Brittain seems to believe is the equivalent of permission to post the images. At one point, Brittain posted some emails that showed some of the Craigslist communications came via his own email address. Oops.

It appears that more and more people are becoming aware of this, and realizing that if Brittain is soliciting these images, often by lying to unsuspecting individuals, the legal issues he may be facing are increasing drastically. A reporter in Denver, Brian Maass has spoken with a woman whose images appeared on the site, and the email exchange... came from the same IP address as Brittain and the non-lawyer "David Blade."

Late Friday, CBS4 broadcast Maass' interview with a woman who met another woman on Craigslist named "Jess Davis." Davis corresponded and sent nude photos of herself, and she asked the other woman to send her racy photos in return. Davis also asked for her date of birth and phone number, saying she was looking to have "just some fun." The victim went along with the exchange, believing she was interacting with a woman.

Five days later, the woman's photos were on IsAnybodyDown, along with her contact info. "This is something I didn't want all of the world to see," she told Maass in the interview, in which her face and voice were obscured.

Turns out, the e-mails from jessdavis877@gmail.com came from the same IP address as Craig Brittain's e-mails—just like e-mails from the "Takedown Lawyer" named "David Blade III," which also apparently originated at Brittain's Colorado Springs home.

Given Steinbaugh's earlier reporting on this, this is hardly surprising, but it raises the legal problems Brittain may come up against at some point.

If Brittain created fake identities to acquire womens' photos and then posted them online himself, it's pretty clear that he won't be protected by the federal law that he believes shields him currently, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That law protects website owners from liability for material posted by their users in certain situations. An attorney who speaks with Maass in the new piece says that by creating fake identities to populate his site with new photos, Brittain's behavior enters the criminal realm.

The Ars Technica report (linked above) that covers the latest Brittain interview also includes a bunch of ridiculous quotes and claims from Brittain, who seems to think he can say just about anything without consequence, such as insisting that the people appearing on his site want to be there.

"You're saying, all those people want to be on your website?" asks Maass.

"I would say so," answers Brittain. "I would suggest they want people to see their pictures... What they don't want is some of the shame, some of the discrimination from people. I would suggest they took the pictures, they obviously want people to see them. They sent a lot of them to random strangers that they had never met."

That's quite a stretch of course. But Brittain then goes even further, suggesting that this is all for the greater good. Yes, putting up naked photos of people that they may have taken willingly, but for a very specific audience, is good for society:

"We actually think the fact they're taking these pictures is a good thing, and an acceptable thing," he says. "We're not trying to shame them or scrutinize them. We're trying to entertain the world. And also to take away a lot of the stigma that's associated with this, because we don't believe these people should be shamed. It may be tough for some of the first people that have been posted. But as time goes on and this gets bigger, this will become more and more of an acceptable thing in society."

That's one way to look at it, though I find it difficult to believe that posting naked images of someone publicly, who had no such intention for those pictures, is unlikely to become a "socially acceptable" kind of thing any time soon.